Why I initially enjoyed the Murderbot books
- The character of murderbot was an interesting and highly entertaining take on the “depressed robot” trope.
- I found the contrast between murderbot’s competence and the humans’ incompetence to be hilarious.
- The futuristic sci-fi universe was interesting and immersive.
- The politics, legal structure, and social/cultural makeup of the Corporate Rim was mildly fascinating.
- Murderbot had a lot of cool gadgets/weapons and knew how to use them.
- I really loved ART as a character: smart, competent, deadly, and possessing all the emotional maturity of a five year-old.
- The alien infections subplot kept me interested.
- There were lots of great plot twists, especially in Book 5.
Why I’ve decided I don’t enjoy them any more
- The worldbuilding is super, super woke:
- Way too much emphasis on fantasy genders and made-up pronouns—in fact, I would say that the clunkiness of “te/ter” and “vi/vir” inadvertently proves that using any other pronouns than those that are biologically derived is nonsensical and inherently ridiculous.
- We’re supposed to understand that the Corporate Rim is evil because… capitalism, I guess? Anyone with power in the CR is the 21st century equivalent of a mustache-twirling victim, and everyone from the free colony resisting the CR is a good guy by default. Boring.
- The good guys are all happily engaged in a polyamorous relationship, and to the extent that there’s ever any friction because of the arrangement, it’s solved when the wise mentor offers some trite and cliched advice about human relationships, like the moral at the end of an episode of Mister Rogers (if Mister Rogers had aired in an alternate free love universe).
- As fun as Murderbot is as a character, the humans are all flat and uninteresting and blend together. Seriously, I can’t keep any of them straight.
- Book 6 is a prequel novella to book 5, with a murder mystery plot that is really a side quest with no bearing whatsoever on the main series arc. Then, book 7 picks up immediately where book 5 left off, without any sort of setup or summarization to ease us back into what’s happening and remind us where everything stands. Way too much in media res.
- Furthermore, book 5 has major spoilers for book 6.
- By book 7, Murderbot’s snarkiness consists mainly of dropping f-bombs on every other page. That’s how we’re supposed to know that murderbot is funny. Because, fuck it. Ha ha ha.
- Why are we supposed to care about this story or the world or any of the characters again? I forget.
- The novellas are way too expensive.
- Also, I personally think the first four novellas would work better if they had been written as a single novel, rather than four shorter books. But if that were the case, the publisher wouldn’t have made 4x profits. Remind me again how capitalism is totally evil? Right.
